Man who was victim in sex predator case dies in wreck

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published
10:00 pm PDT, Wednesday, June 22, 2005

TACOMA -- A man who was mutilated at age 7 in an attack that was instrumental in adoption of the nation's first law for indefinite confinement of sexual predators died earlier this month in a motorcycle wreck.

Ryan Alan Hade died June 9 when his yellow Suzuki motorcycle collided with a pickup truck near Yelm.

Hade was known to relatively few as the victim of a grisly attack in 1989 that made national headlines. A convicted sex offender, Earl Kenneth Shriner, was sentenced the next year to 131 years in prison for ambushing and raping him, cutting off his penis, stabbing him and leaving him for dead in a Tacoma park.

Legislators cited the case in adopting the nation's first state law to allow indefinite civil confinement of sexual predators, noting that Shriner had a 25-year history of perversion and violence against young people.

Now 55, Shriner remains in prison.

Hade underwent reconstructive surgery and was in counseling through age 13. When middle school classmates began asking whether he was the boy who had been attacked by Shriner, he switched to New Horizon School in Renton to get more attention for dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. He completed the ninth grade while living with his father, Lowell Hade, in Roseburg, Ore., then returned to Tacoma, later enrolling at Bates Technical College to learn upholstery.

Hade left home at age 18, became interested in real estate investing and bought, renovated and sold one home in Tacoma and another in Spanaway.

His mother, Helen Harlow, said Hade supported himself with such work, in addition to upholstery jobs and a monthly stipend from a trust fund she formed with donations from the public that at one point reached nearly $1 million.

At the time of his death, he was living in a mobile home on seven acres in Roy and looking for a one-story duplex in Tacoma for himself and his grandmother, Betty Foote of University Place. She said he wanted to spare her knees the strain of going up and down stairs in her current home.

Hade remembered few details of the attack and rarely talked about it, but until two or three years ago, he would become tense, irritable and physically ill each year around the anniversary of the harrowing crime, friends and relatives said.

"It's like he just put it out of his mind. He just felt comfortable with that fellow put away," Foote said.

Hade enjoyed skateboarding, snowboarding and skydiving, recently got a flying lesson from a cousin while visiting Illinois and not long ago bought a 1979 Pontiac Trans-Am to overhaul, calling it a "chick magnet," Harlow said.

"He survived something that was extreme, and consequently, he lived his life extreme," Harlow said. "You cheat death once, you figure you can cheat it just about any time you want."

"He always talked how life was short, you've got to make every day count," said Chris Kunkel, who considered Hade his best friend. "That's really what he did, make every day count ...